`Love' mixes cabaret class, klutzy sap

Unabashed retro-saps rejoice: The Michael Feinstein fans, lonely hearts and musical theater majors of the world have just been thrown a bone.

The earnest, low-budget indie "Anything But Love" isn't quite the movie you'd like it to be, but it provides some kicks, nonetheless.

Billie Golden (Isabel Rose) is a struggling, thirtysomething redhead who waitresses in Manhattan, sings cabaret to a sparse crowd by night and still lives with her alcoholic mother in Queens.

After a botched audition for a singing gig, she encounters former high school crush and rich guy Greg (Cameron Bancroft, sort of an overly sharpened Rob Lowe), who loves everything about her, except for her love for cabaret.

When Billie finds herself falling for her scruffy piano teacher Elliot (Andrew McCarthy), it's really not a question of which guy she'll end up with, only how it all will happen.

The film wears its heart--and its nostalgia--on its sleeve, but while it's clearly made by people who love old Hollywood musicals, it never stoops to being just a vehicle for smug genre references. Instead, it honors its forebears with economical dialogue, hardy-har humor and characters as heartfelt as they are broad.

Still, it asks for a lot of leeway.

As the film's heroine, Rose, who co-wrote the screenplay with first-time director Robert Cary, has an abrasive staginess that, while appropriate to the part of a girl who wears vintage get-ups and daydreams in dance sequences, is hard to warm to nonetheless. She's also a mediocre singer but, again, she's supposed to be.

In order to buy her ill-advised romance with the cardboard Greg, you might have to remind yourself of all the ill-advised romances you've seen in real life. The lighting is also unflattering; the filmmakers say they were aiming for an old soundstage look--but one doesn't recall Judy Garland's crow's-feet ever looking this defined.

If you have any leeway left, you can save it for the ending, which stumbles around with a couple of ideas before it fits into place.

The film does, however, carry off the scenes that count, such as an a-ha! moment with Eartha Kitt and a moving lesson Elliot gives Billie on why certain songs should endure--not because they evoke a more glamorous era, but because they say things that are still relevant to the heart. The fact that their lesson takes place in a studio with a view of a ghostly Manhattan skyline lends it a gravitas the filmmakers never could have anticipated.

For the romantics in the audience, the old skyline underscores the importance of Billie following her heart and pursuing a life in song despite the chilling warnings of her mother. Of course, the non-romantics can argue that, in some sick, aesthetic way, the filmmakers just got lucky.

Either way, neither will be likely to forget the oft-repeated title song; a hummable tune is something else this cute, klutzy confection gets right.

`Anything But Love'(star)(star)1/2

Directed by Robert Cary; written by Cary and Isabel Rose; photographed by Horacio Marquinez; production designed by Cecil Gentry; edited by Robert Reitano; music by Andrew Hollander and Steven Lutvak; produced by Aimee Schoof and Isen Robbins. A Samuel Goldwyn Films release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:39. MPAA rating: PG-13 (some language and innuendo).